After an extensive search and testing over several months, I settled on CentralDesktop earlier this year as my client collaboration tool of choice. For those with multiple ongoing projects and/or virtual team members in various locations, it just can’t be beat in both number of features and ease of use. It eliminates the need for several separate applications, saving time and money.
Some highlights from InformationWeek’s Rolling Review:
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Central Desktop’s namesake hosted service leads off our Rolling Review of Web 2.0 collaboration tools, and our tests showed it’s a good choice for team-building.
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The process of creating and sharing documents was straightforward, and we could upload and download those documents in most popular formats. Administrative controls allowed us to regulate who could see information in a workspace and who can add, change, or delete it. The revision history option tracks all changes.
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Central Desktop provides powerful search options: We searched across the Web; in text; and through documents in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, and HTML. Searches across conversation threads and across multiple workspaces also are possible.
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In tests, we created a workspace for reviewing and developing a specification for a new wireless product. After adding some milestones to the product schedule, we created a list of tasks and added members. Setup was easy for each of these functions.
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New members were automatically invited to access the workspace, and they were allowed to create accounts once they accepted the invitation. From that point on, members could modify the look and feel of their views of the workspace. Changes were subject to the overall restrictions we specified when they were invited.
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Central Desktop gets high grades for security. The software supports single-sign-on access, but all communications must be done through a secure connection, and administrative settings allow complete access control to fields and documents.
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Central Desktop’s pricing is in line with other hosted packages we’ve seen, ranging from no charge for two workspaces with five participants to $249 per month for as many as 100 workspaces with 100 internal and 100 external members.
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In addition to all of the above, the feature that really seals the deal for me personally is its offline back up feature. Although CentralDesktop does its own constant back ups, being able to make a local copy of my “office in the cloud” provides great peace of mind. Weekly, all I have to do is do a one-click back up of all my client and administrative Workspaces, which are sent to me in a zipped file for local storage. Ahhhh…
But don’t just take InformationWeek’s word for it – or mine.
Do try CentralDesktop out for yourself and take advantage of a Free 30-Day Trial and 25% Discount for Life!
You’ll soon be wondering how you ever got along without it.
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